When planning to launch an ecommerce store, choosing an ecommerce platform can prove a difficult choice. Factors such as pricing, ease of use, and design, all influence your ultimate decision.

Two major ecommerce platforms are Magento and Aspdotnetstorefront, offering great solutions for SMEs who wish to sell online.

If you have wondered what the difference is between Magento and AspDotNetsStorefront (ASPDNSF), then this blog post highlights the key variations, and how they suit your online strategy.

We need to declare upfront that we are AspDotNetStorefront development partners, and that we do not work with Magento. However, we were in an unusual position whereby we were able to interview a company that had worked with both platforms. This post contains a summary of that interview, comparing the two ecommerce platforms on a variety of criteria.

Speed and resources

The first observation made about Magento was that it is very resource hungry and therefore very slow. The ASPDNSF site was run on one integrated dedicated server, but the Magento site was running on 2 web servers, 2 database servers, and 1 caching server; resulting in speeds 133% slower than the ASPDNSF site.

The company ran a performance improvement project and they have now improved the speed, but it still exceeds the page load times of the ASPDNSF site.

Extensions and functionality

Magento has a wealth of prewritten extensions and functionality, showing the strength of an open source platform. These extensions were reported to be ridiculously easy to install.

Customisations

However well both platforms work out of the box, it is not unusual for businesses to require custom functionality. While a knowledgeable ecommerce manager could tweak and adjust certain elements in ASPDNSF, this is not the case in Magento. It requires a specialised Magento developer to do this.

For example, if you need a custom report in ASPDNSF, you can pull together a report in a few hours in an XML package and only requires 1 file. However, in Magento, this same report required some 40 files – and most of the files were empty, but were required to make the report work.

Reporting efficiency

An ecommerce manager with some database knowledge can create reports quite easily by querying the database in ASPDNSF. However the structure of the Magento EAV was reported as “horrible”.

So where writing a query in ASPDNSF would take 10 minutes, it would take 1 hour in Magento.

Learning curve

Our experience is that most of our clients find ASPDNSF very intuitive to work with and I had expected the same of Magento.

However, Magento apparently has a steep learning curve for those new to the platform, in comparison.

Admin interface

The admin interface is easy to use in ASPDNSF, however Magento is apparently unintuitive and makes it easy to get things wrong.

No doubt this improves with the user’s experience of the Magento admin, but nonetheless AspDotNetStorefront still manages to win this round.

Caching

Magento defaults to full page caching and it is difficult to know when changes made will appear.

Our interviewer described this aspect as “a bit of a black art”.

Cost

The enterprise version of Magento is $10K per annum, whereas an ASPDNSF Enterprise licence is $3,794.

Security

Now this is the point that did not surprise me. I always expect that open source platforms will be more vulnerable than closed ones. However what I heard made my skin crawl!

One customer was able to login to their account and see another customer’s details. Apparently there is a fault in the core Magento code and at the time of interview a patch had not been released.

There is no such vulnerability on the ASPDNSF platform.

Search Engine Optimisation

Both Magento and ASPDNSF have been built with search engines in mind so that URLS are search engine friendly and each product can have unique metadata.

Magento has a neat Google AdWords and Shopping extension. ASPDNSF achieves this through their cloud based dotFeed platform. While there are advantages to the dotFeed platform, the simplicity of feeding direct from the software is missed.

Import/Export

The spreadsheet upload facility in ASPDNSF is fast and simple.

Magento has a comprehensive API, but it is very slow to load products through this.

Because of this it’s a tie, with Magento’s API and AspDotNetStorefront’s easy spreadsheet uploading capabilities.

So in summary, if what is really important to you is the extensions and ease of add-ons, then opting for Magento is a safe bet.

On the other hand, if you want a cost-effective platform that is secure, easy to work with, is resource efficient and can be easily customised , then AspDotNetStorefront is the appropriate ecommerce platform for your business.

If you’re interested in implementing AspDotNetStorefront into your next Ecommerce Website build, then get in touch with the team here at Xanthos here, or call us on 08450 740 068.